I expected Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener to be revolutionary in tone: a fictional counterpart to Paul Lafargue’s The Right to Be Lazy, with its disdain for work and its praise of leisure. The Greeks in their era of greatness had only contempt for work: their slaves alone were permitted to labour; the free man knew only exercises for the body and mind, Lafargue writes.
But Bartleby is not an idler. He is something more disquieting. At the beginning of his employment as a scrivener, he performs an extraordinary quantity of writing. Then, asked to examine a document, he simply responds, “I would prefer not to.” From that moment, his eccentricity unfolds with a strange, unsettling persistence.
Melville conjures not only Bartleby but also the trio of Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut: copyists whose more predictable eccentricities only heighten Bartleby’s opacity. In just sixty-four pages, he compresses a narrative that resists interpretation, lingering long after it ends.
>Quietly unsettling. I love this story. The power of that oft-repeated refrain.
>Yes, very disquieting. Almost as disquieting as Bartelby himself is his boss's odd unwillingness (and then inability) to get rid of him. I should revisit this.
>Frances: What power: I declined an opportunity yesterday using this precise refrain.Emily: After the boss relocates to new premises, the story takes a Kafkaesque turn, a bizarre and powerful story. I had no idea Melville wrote like this.
>This is one of my favorite novellas and I love how it starts quite funny then becomes disquieting before ending in that tragic manor in only 64 pages.
>Spot on, Jessica, from the start I expected an edgy comedy, but what a tragic, dark conclusion. Language aside, it felt a very modern story.